Hemsley Winfield

Osborne Hemsley Winfield was born on the twentieth of April 1907 in Yonkers, New York, the son of Jeroline Hemsley Winfield — a nurse, educator, and playwright of children's plays whose work first drew her son toward the stage. As a young man he acted and directed with the Sekondi Players of Yonkers, and in 1927 he appeared in a children's play, "The Princess and the Cat," written by his mother.

From these theatrical beginnings Winfield turned to dance, and it is there that he made history. In 1931 he gathered a company that, after its first performance as the Bronze Ballet Plastique on the sixth of March, he renamed the New Negro Art Theatre Dance Group — the first all-Black-American concert-dance company. Its recital was hailed as the first Negro dance recital in America, opening a stage where none had existed before.

On the seventh of January 1933, Winfield danced the Congo witch doctor in Louis Gruenberg's opera "The Emperor Jones" at the Metropolitan Opera, becoming the first African American to be contracted by and to receive a role credit in a Met production — more than two decades before Marian Anderson's celebrated 1955 debut. He also choreographed the opera's dances, shaping the movement as well as performing it.

His life closed early: he died of pneumonia on the fifteenth of January 1934, not yet twenty-seven. In a span of only a few years he opened a door that generations of Black dancers would walk through. May the memory of Hemsley Winfield, who made a place where there had been none, be forever honored.